Recently I ran into a bit of a problem. See, I'm a noble worker, and my work was slow and dead, I'd already browsed Twitter, and I had to do something. Unfortunately, I wasn't in the space to play on my 3DS, and there was nothing to do in Master Duel, so I decided "yeah sure why not I'll try this" and it certainly did save me for those 40 minutes. You get paywalled pretty fast, so of course I finished the levels pretty early on.

The decorating stuff seems pointless and the main levels are fairly easy to just go through and require memorization (especially for the purple/pink coins) to master, but Toad Rally making you feel like you're racing someone for both speed and coins forces a lot more strategy into the game which is nice.

The stuff where you play 10 quick segments in a row kinda sucks though. It's pure memorization for Purple coins and sometimes you'll be spawned in to where if you don't act quick you'll die.

It's a mixed bag but again for killing some time when I had nothing to do in Master Duel it served its purpose.

This is an in-progress review. But yeah I think this is a great take on Mario as a $10 app, sorta like a stylised auto-runner with a strong emphasis on replaying levels to collect coins and building upon the Mushroom Kingdom. It reminds me a little of Donkey Kong Jungle Beat in the manner of score attack mode and “style points” for those competitive toad audience stages.

I just cleared the stages and already I’m back for pink coins, relays as well as opening up the Star World stages! Whelp I think I’m being drawn in, at least I’ve already bought in.

its barely passable by mario standards, but completely serviceable amongst an ocean of freemium garbage.

the real redeemer is toad rally. this game's most compelling offering is the euphoria of the star powerup and collecting hundreds of coins.

if mario run doubled down on toad rally - expanding the level selection, rewarding skill more precisely and polishing its connecting to the kingdom building progression, it could be great. but as it stands, there's just a lot of missed potential and the ceiling is passively accumulating toads to unlock a new decoration every 10 hours.

I had fun with it. toad rally was fun enough to get mynintendo rewards for some sweet free knick knacks plus shipping - but it was a worthy experiment for nintendo and I hope they try again with a better focus on what they did right the first time around.